Pie A La Murder (32 page)

On my pad, I made note of the three numbers and reached for the reverse directory to find out to whom the majority of those calls had been made.

I felt a lurch inside my chest when I saw that the greatest number of calls had been placed to Galen Light.

“This must be Roxanne’s cell,” I said. “She called Galen Light twelve times. The last call was the day before her husband was murdered.”

“Who else did she call?”

“I’m looking . . .” I turned pages in the reverse directory until I found a name to go with the 310 number that was called six times. “It’s a doctor,” I said. “Sanford Udall, MD.”

Nicholas’s eyebrows rose. “Sanford
Udall
?”

“Yes.”

He chuckled. “I don’t think that phone belongs to Roxanne,” he said.

“Why? And what’s so funny?”

“You don’t recognize the name? Sanford Udall. He’s fat, bald, in his sixties, glasses with big black frames. He wears a white jacket when he does commercials on cable TV about his specialty.”

“I’ve never seen one,” I said. “What’s his specialty?”

“Erectile dysfunction.” Nicholas handed his cell phone to me. “Look at the keypad and see what his phone number spells out in letters.”

I looked. It took a minute of mental juggling, but then I saw . . . “Oh, no. I don’t believe it.” When translated from numerals into letters Doctor Udall’s phone number spelled out “Har-dnow.”

Nicholas grinned. “I can tell from your face that you got it: ‘Hard Now.’ He announces that in his commercials. It’s the mnemonic he uses so prospective patients can’t forget his number.”

“I’m surprised the phone company, or is it the FCC, allows him to say that.”

“It was a fight, several years ago,” Nicholas said. “I remember the case. The ruling was that those two words are not obscene—only suggestive. Anyway, I doubt that Roxanne Redding was a patient of his.”

“But if this is Alec’s phone, why did he call Galen Light so often?”

“It’s something we need to find out about.” Nicholas indicated the pages in my hand. “Who was the third person called on that line—the 949 number?”

I flipped through pages until I came to the right one. Running my finger down the list of numbers I found what I was looking for. “This is interesting. The number belongs to a house in San Clemente, owned by April Zane. The actress.”

“She could be just a photographic client. What’s his business number?”

I told Nicholas, and he scanned the four other piles until he found the calls for that number. “Here it is. He called her on the business line twice three months ago, then once the month after that. . . . Then nothing.”

“That’s when he started calling her on the cell.”

“When I get back to the office I’ll go through the paper’s archives and see what I can find out about her. Maybe something will indicate if they were having an affair.”

“If so, she could be another suspect,” I said. “He cut off the affair and she killed him. Or Roxanne found out about the affair and
she
killed him. Or Galen Light had some kind of a twelve-call relationship with Redding, and
he
killed him. Or Prince Freddie killed him in an attempt to prevent the picture of Celeste from going public and ruining his chances to marry money. Or Tanis and Freddie killed him together.”

Nicholas shook his head. “No. Tanis didn’t kill him. Absolutely not. I might consider that if the photo of Celeste was missing, but it’s still in the Redding house. Tanis wouldn’t do anything so extreme unless she got what she wanted. Freddie might be a bungler, but she most definitely is not.”

We spend the next hour checking phone numbers against the reverse directory and writing down the names of people called on all five of the lines. At nine o’clock, Nicholas put down his pen, folded the sheets of paper on which he’d been making notes, and tucked them into his jacket pocket.

“I’ve got to put this book back before it’s missed,” he said. “Then I’m meeting Olivia at the police station. Call you later?”

I nodded.

We kissed good-bye at the front door. I was on my way back to the kitchen when the phone rang. When I picked up the extension in the living room and said, “Hello,” I heard Olivia Wayne’s voice.

“I’ve been going head-to-head with Galen Light’s lawyer, Wylie York. He’s been demanding fifty thousand dollars to drop the charges against you,” she said.

I felt my face flush with anger.

“Fifty thousand dollars! Light assaulted
me
. All I did was defend myself. That’s outrageous.”

“You were an English teacher,” she said. “You should listen to the tense of my verbs. I said he ‘has been’ demanding that. Pending your agreement, I’ve reached a settlement with the slimy little toad.”

“What
settlement
are we talking about?” My voice had a distinct edge to it.

“Retract your claws, Della. Okay, I shouldn’t have told you what he wanted before I told you what he’s getting, which is nothing. Nada. He drops the charges against you and you drop the charges against Light.”

“That’s better than my having to pay him anything, but it means that Light gets away without being punished for assaulting me.”

“Not really. You gave him a broken nose that’s going to require plastic surgery to make him look good again. I’d like to have had a big red ‘R’ branded on his chest, but we’re too civilized to do that.”

Now that I’d had a moment to process the information about the resolution of the case, I asked, “How did you make York back off?”

I heard a self-satisfied little chuckle on her end of the line. “Wile E. Coyote had a vulnerable underside that I exploited,” she said. “I heard a rumor that he’s a rooster with a taste for underage chicks, so I maneuvered him into a situation with one of my PI agency’s operatives who’s twenty-four but looks fourteen. All we let him do was touch her, but we got pictures. Even if he finds out her real age someday, flashing those shots was enough to scare the fight out of him. From the guilty way he reacted, I know that if I wanted to spend the time and money, I could come up with the real thing in his past.”

“What a disgusting creep.”

“And it’s a lucky thing for us that he is. Della, I’ve defended a lot of people I wouldn’t have dinner with, but I’ve always drawn the line at rapists and child molesters. It helps me sleep at night to think that the ones to whom the law doesn’t dole out what they deserve to get, pay for it some other way. If a doctor ever tells me I have a terminal illness, I might decide to become a vigilante, like Charles Bronson in
Death Wish
.”

“I’m in favor of evil being punished, but I don’t want it to be because a doctor told you to put your affairs in order.”

“Much to my surprise, I like you, too,” she said.

“You’re surprised?”

“Months ago, when Nick brought me over to meet you, my first impression was that you were a kind of Stepford Wife—or Stepford Widow. Too damn nice to be real. But I’ve learned you can be almost as much of a badass as I am. You just conceal it better.”

“Sisters under the skin?”

“Just don’t expect me to be all girly and go shopping with you.”

“I hate to shop,” I said.

“Before we get sloppy, I’ve got to meet Nick at the cop house. Try to stay out of legal trouble for a while.” She disconnected.

I went back to the kitchen and the pages of telephone numbers and names that matched the numbers.

So much information, but what did it mean?

I told Tuffy, “I’ve got to see if there’s some kind of a pattern to the calls.”

He looked at me as though he understood, and sauntered to his dog bed to settle in and leave me to it.

Going through the lists of names that matched the phone numbers, I started crossing out the calls that seemed of doubtful relevance to the murder investigation, such as those to photo supply houses, framers, a plumber, the Reddings’ pool service, the Home Shopping Network and QVC, Neiman Marcus, a watch repair company, weekly calls to Jenson’s Market in Century City, and a call to Publishers Clearing House.

One call two months ago was made to a gynecologist, presumably Roxanne’s. Two separate calls, from two different phones, went to a dentist in Beverly Hills. I guessed that the Reddings used the same dental professional.

In all of those names and numbers I couldn’t find one call made to Gretchen Tully. If they had communicated it must have been either by Gretchen calling Roxanne, or showing up at Roxanne’s door, as Gretchen had done to me.

It was tedious work. By the time I finished eliminating the calls that it seemed reasonable to ignore, my neck ached from bending over the pages and my right hand was cramped from lining through numbers.

But I had much shorter call lists for each of the Reddings’ numbers.

Getting up, I stretched and rotated my neck. I let Tuffy out into the fenced backyard, filled a bowl with fresh, cool water, and put it outside for him in a shady area beside the door.

It was noon and I was hungry, but I didn’t want to bother making anything complicated. After surveying the contents of my pantry, I decided to have sardines on toast. One can of skinless, boneless on a piece of twelve grain bread. It would be delicious—and it was brain food.

Emma must have smelled the sardines when I opened the can, because I heard her trotting down the hallway. In seconds she was beside me in the kitchen, rubbing against my leg. “Okay,” I told her, “I’ll share. But too much won’t be good for you.” I put one sardine on a clean dish and placed it between her dry food and her water dish. She attacked the tiny fish, finished it in what might have been record time, and licked up every drop of oil. Then, purring, she stepped into Tuffy’s bed, curled up, and went to sleep.

I went outside to run around the yard with Tuffy for a few minutes to get my blood circulating. When I’d had enough of the game we played where I chased him and then turned around and he chased me, I began to throw tennis balls for him. After about a dozen tosses, he took the ball in his mouth, but instead of bringing it back to me he sat down under the big shade tree with it between his front paws. That was my signal; he wanted to relax and I should get back to work.

Whether it was the sardines or the exercise, I returned to my task with fresh energy. I wished that I had Alec and Roxanne’s actual cell phones, because then the logs would also tell me about incoming calls. Unfortunately, all I had were the lists of outgoing.

It was a beginning. Turning my white legal pad sideways, I began making charts of the people the Reddings called, and the dates and times of the calls.

And, at last, a pattern began to emerge. . . .

The cell phone number that I’d decided must belong to Roxanne, the one used to call the gynecologist, also showed multiple calls to Galen Light. I began to match the dates of Roxanne’s calls to Light against those of Alec Redding’s. Then I matched the times and durations of each of their calls.

Before I jumped to any conclusions, I moved over to my desk, attached the cable from Liddy’s spy camera to the computer, and zipped through her dozens of shots until I came to the pages she’d photographed from Alec Redding’s monthly appointment book. Fortunately, it had been on his bedside table. Had it been in the studio, Liddy would not have been able to touch it.

According to his book, Alec Redding had photographed Galen Light five months ago. While I was studying his appointments, I saw that April Zane had also been photographed by Redding. So, too, had some of the other names that had come up on the phone lists. But only Light and Zane had been contacted subsequently from the cell phones. Alec and/or Roxanne had communicated with every other Redding client via the landlines.

I wished I had records of e-mails and text messages, but the police surely had those. All I had was the information in the appointment book and on the pages of phone calls. Maybe it would be enough to, at least, allow me to come up with a theory of the crime.
Crimes.
The murders of Alec and Gretchen had to be connected. John thought so, and it seemed Detective Keller agreed.